At a Forrester Research event in the early 2000s, then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue was asked a question: “When are you going to let fans control the game?” His response to Forrester founder George Colony was simple: “I don’t know, why don’t you figure it out for me?”
Many years later, one of the original members of Forrester Research, Julie Meringer, figured it out in the form of Your Call Football (YCF). Set to be demoed on the jumbotron at the 2017 Fenway Gridiron Series, YCF is best described as a play calling competition during a live game, among fans.
YCF’s patent-pending technology allows anyone who downloads the app to control real-time football action through voting on coach-selected plays. Although the system is built to work for both offense and defense, fans will call plays strictly for offense.
“We have built the coach technology to allow coaches to have their plays bundled in groups of three based on situations on the field so they can easily, within a seven-second timeframe, push the plays out to anyone who’s downloaded the app,” Meringer explained. “The fan then picks the play that they want, it goes back up into the cloud and gets tallied and it comes down to the coaches technology.”
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
The coach technology is just one piece of an entire system that YCF has built. The game cast portion lets user knows things like down & distance, who’s in possession of the ball and the score. They’ve also developed a scoring module with an algorithm that allows fans to rack up points based on the skill of their play calling. “Those points will determine from a competition standpoint how you do on the leaderboard against everybody else,” said Meringer.
Fans can also challenge their friends by competing in a head-to-head setting or in a league. They’ll compete for virtual coins which can be redeemed for YCF merchandise as well as cash prizes once they fully launch in 2018.
One key distinction for YCF is that all the players and coaches will be their own employees. “We’ve hired a VP of football who is right now looking at hiring our coaches for the fall,” said Meringer. “Almost 2,700 division one players aren’t going to the NFL every year so we have plenty of players and they’ll be employees of ours.”
Meringer knows that that the eSports/gamer world is booming, and YCF is meant to fit right in. “It’s the first time engaging fans, not just with the game on the field, but the game within the game.”